Visual Studio Team Services

What do you like best?

VSTS is a product that allows for easy-to-find solutions from all pieces of the software development pipeline. What I like the most about it is that I don't have to go to separate applications to accomplish the tasks required for delivering or for finding out what issues are present.

What do you dislike?

The benefit of having one product to accomplish multiple goals is that it does not integrate well with outside products or clients to bring in existing data. If a team is switching from one product over to Visual Studio Team Services, they may have to recreate solutions, which is inefficient.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If moving from another project management system over to VSTS/Azure DevOps, try to manually copy anything that you may need for perpetuity between the two applications. There are plugins for managing things of that nature, but it's not particularly simple, straightforward or even free to do so. Be prepared to pay for any services rendered if 5 or more subscriptions are required for your team, or if you require on premises hosting, which is not supported through Azure DevOps and requires an upgrade to Azure DevOps Server, which is a paid service.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are bringing Visual Studio solutions into continuous integration/continuous development with issue tracking and code sniffing included, as well as hosting software packages. The benefit of having all artifacts available in the same ecosystem as the codebase that you're working in is extremely valuable, and I've enjoyed having that.